Wednesday, February 13, 2013

With Opera announcing that their future products will be based on WebKit, the Internet is abuzz with discussion about what that means and whether it's a good thing. Looking at it as a jQuery developer, it's a good thing if it gets WebKit participants to fix bugs and update older implementations. I can't be optimistic without some evidence that things are really going to change.

Opera did land their first WebKit patch so they wanted to make a statement that they weren't getting out of core browser development altogether. Then again, the age of that bug just underscores one of the problems with WebKit. It took five and a half years to make a half-line fix! Now as a first commit it's a great one for the Opera team, since it lets them get the feel of the system and of course they had to write a few more lines of unit tests. But five years? Why so long to fix a trivial bug? Because fixing bugs doesn't make news.

Each release of Chrome or Safari generates excitement about new bleeding-edge features; nobody seems to worry about the stuff that's already (still!) broken. jQuery Core has more lines of fixes and patches for WebKit than any other browser. In general these are not recent regressions, but long-standing problems that have yet to be addressed. Opera probably doesn't have any more incentive to fix the common bugs than any of the other diners at the WebKit table -- especially when jQuery continues to cover up these mistakes. Instead, Opera will want to focus on their own bleeding-edge unique features, all while people complain about jQuery's "bloat".

When we started our jQuery 2.0 cleanup to remove IE 6/7/8 hacks, we were optimistic that we would also be able to remove some bloat from lingering patches needed for really old browsers like Safari 2. But several of those WebKit hacks still remain. Even when they have been fixed in the latest Chrome or Safari, older WebKit implementations like PhantomJS and UIWebView still don't have the fix. We've had to put back several of these as users reported problems with the beta. It's starting to feel like oldIE all over again, but with a different set of excuses for why nothing can be fixed.